Happy Birthday, Larry McMurtry!

By Katharina Koch. Jun 3, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Pulitzer Prize, Literature, Movie Tie-Ins

June 3 is a great opportunity to celebrate Larry McMurtry and to tell a story about our visit to his hometown of Archer City late last year. Born on this day in 1936, McMurtry is the author of thirty-two novels and just as many screenplays, in addition to a handful of memoirs and essay collections. McMurtry is most known for his novel Lonesome Dove, which won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was adapted into a television series that won seven Emmy Awards. Many of his novelsincluding The Evening Star, The Last Picture Show, Texasville, Terms of Endearment, and Horseman, Pass By were adapted into films that won a total of ten Academy Awards. Notably, McMurtry also co-wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain .      
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Five Facts About Thomas Hardy

By Matt Reimann. Jun 2, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Rare Books, Literature

Thomas Hardy’s long life, spanning from 1840 to 1928, positions him between two critical points in literary history. His legacy connects the masterful British writers like Wordsworth and Eliot to the era of Modernism that culminated in the likes of Woolf and that other, more poetic Eliot. Hardy’s most significant work spans some five decades, comprising novels and poetry that today are regarded as classics of the canon.

     
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The Bond Dossier: Moonraker

By Nick Ostdick. Jun 1, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Book Collecting, James Bond

If there’s one overarching fear authors experience when creating novel series, it’s repetitiondrudging up the same plot twists and themes and motifs novel after novel until each story essentially becomes a parody of itself. In fact, Ian Fleming expressed that very sentiment to friends and confidants during the early stages of writing his third Bond novel, Moonraker.

But if Fleming had any anxieties about rehashing material from Casino Royale and Live and Let Die, those trepidations did not present in the final product. Moonraker, which many consider to be Fleming’s best Bond novelnoted author and close friend Noel Coward remarked as such to Fleming and in the press on several occasionsstrives for greater depth and complexity than Fleming’s previous Bond novels, investigating both the quieter aspects of Bond’s personal life and the state of British culture and identity in the early 1950s, post World War II.

     
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The Loneliness of T.H. White, the Man Who Wrote of Kings

By Abigail Wheetley. May 29, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Legendary Authors, Literature

T.H. White is the man best known for writing the King Arthur books; the ones about the young boy who pulls a sword from a stone and creates Camelot with his wizard mentor Merlin. These stories are beloved, retold, and have been reinvented as animated films and full scale musicals, even defining the time in America before the assassination of President Kennedy.

Camelot, it seems, is a perfect place, one where there is no trouble, life is easy, and love is pure. White’s life, however, bore no resemblance to such a place, and his battle with alcohol, emotion, and his own natural tendencies influenced his work and led him to live a truly lonely yet remarkable life.

     
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Rachel Carson: Mother of the Environmental Movement

By Brian Hoey. May 27, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Science

For those of you who believe that climate change is the most significant threat facing the world right now, Rachel Carson should be your patron saint. A noted nature writer and a marine biologist by trade, Carson helped to usher in the modern environmentalist movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring, an indictment of pesticide overuse that is at once scathing and deeply unsettling to read. More than 50 years after her death, the deeply-held concern over the fate of the planet that she so scorchingly exemplified is a more powerful (and arguably much more urgent) force than ever.

     
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Alexander Pushkin & the Beginning of Russian Literature

By Matt Reimann. May 26, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Poetry

Russia holds a distinguished place in the vast world of modern literature. Insulated from the larger cultural trends of mainland Europe, it exploded onto the scene in the nineteenth century. It has produced some titanic names—Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov—and a string of others that will endure through the ages. What caused this impressive boom is unclear, but its origin is far easier to trace. Russia, that powerhouse of modern literature, begins with the poet Alexander Pushkin.

     
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Six Surprising Facts About Ralph Waldo Emerson

By Abigail Wheetley. May 25, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Legendary Authors, Poetry

Ralph Waldo Emerson is a figure that speaks of New Hampshire, poetry, and a deep understanding of the world and nature. A man of great thought, deep contemplation, and vivid humor, Emerson has lived and existed within the canon of great literature for generations. Though he is an iconic figure, there a few interesting facts that might surprise you about the great poet.      
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The Persistent Voice of Mikhail Sholokhov

By Andrea Diamond. May 24, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Literature, Nobel Prize Winners

“Good things take time” is an old adage that has been issued to almost everyone at one point or another in their lifetime. It flows from the mouths of professors as they warn their students not to wait until the night before to start their 15-page research paper, from coaches of disgruntled beginner athletes, and from parents attempting to convince their child to be more diligent in practicing their piano notes. With the boom of technology and the drive for convenience, it seems being patient grows more difficult with each passing day. Waiting for the Wi-Fi connection at a local coffee shop feels like eternity, and we suffer extreme indignation when the pizza delivery man takes more than 30 minutes to arrive. While the art of efficiency and the drive for productivity is not without its benefits in the world today, it is often best ignored by the creative mind. Good bookslike many things in lifetake time. In the case of Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov, it took fourteen years.

     
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Arnold Lobel: The Anatomy of a Fable

By Connie Diamond. May 22, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: Children's Books, Literature

The genesis of the fable is unclear, but its legacy is far-reaching. The name "Aesop" is synonymous with fables, although the stories themselves and their corresponding lessons had been handed down for generations before he recorded them several hundred years B.C. They made their first appearance in printed English in 1484. It is safe to say, then, that fables are an integral part of our collective literary and cultural history. Their lessons are universal and timeless. Who among us has not been exhorted to heed the lesson of the Hare and the Tortoise and remember that “slow and steady wins the race,” or to mistrust appearances and beware of “the wolf in sheep’s clothing.” These morals were just one component of the fable formula, and they happened to be the component that Arnold Lobel disliked.

     
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Home On the Range: Five Writers from the American Southwest

By Nick Ostdick. May 21, 2016. 9:00 AM.

Topics: American Literature, Literary travel

Deserts. The Mojave. The Sonoran. The Chihuahuan. Vast, barren, dusty landscapes with skies that seem to stretch forever, and towering, jagged rock formations cut from the scorched earth. Cacti. Heat. Sun. In other words, tough country, both in terms of its topography and culture and politics.

Conflict between American settlers and Native American Indians looms large in the history of this place, as does the often tortured relationship its inhabitants experience between calling this region home and striving to get out. But as we’ve seen time and time again with this series, great conflict often breeds great beauty, and writers from the American Southwest are no stranger to conflictboth in terms of the region’s geography and politicsand, as it turns out, the wealth of artistic expression born from it, particularly in the literary arts.

     
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